Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the rug hooking craft, and more particularly, to a workstation to facilitate hooking of rugs and for storage of rug hooking supplies, tools, and equipment, such as rug hooking fabric swatches, cut fabric strips, a fabric-cutting device and a framed rug foundation.
The manual process of creating a rug with cut fabric strips and the like is known as hooking a rug. The essential tools, supplies, and equipment for hooking a rug are the hook, a variety of colored fabric swatches, which are cut into strips, a fabric-cutting device and the rug foundation or background with the design of the rug imprinted thereon. The rug foundation is mounted to a frame to keep the rug foundation taut for better rug hooking.
To hook a rug, the person creating the rug, also known as a rug hooker, inserts the hook into the foundation from top to bottom, and then a portion of a cut fabric strip is hooked and pulled up to the top of the rug foundation to form a loop of the desired height. The rug hooker uses this continuous technique, with the material at hand, changing colors as desired, to create a rug.
Due to the variety of colors and fabrics needed to hook a given rug, the rug hooker must keep a variety of fabric swatches readily accessible. The rug hooker also frequently stops to cut the fabric strips, and must then store cut fabric swatches into strips from each of the variety of fabric swatches. The work area can become quite cluttered, as the fabric pieces often end up strewn about, and the various swatches and cut fabric strips often end up mixed together. Being a manual craft, it is desirable for the materials, tools, and equipment to be mobile.
Therefore, there is a need to have a novel workstation to organize the rug hooking supplies, tools, and equipment and thereby facilitate the process of rug hooking. There is also a need for a novel workstation that is mobile, to enable the rug hooker to work in different places, with material readily accessible.
There is also a need for a novel workstation to organize the process of cutting the fabric swatches into strips. The fabric swatches should be readily visible and accessible in an organized fashion, in close proximity to the fabric-cutting device, with the cut fabric strips also nearby to simplify and provide orderliness to the rug hooking craft.